Inside the Mind of BTK

188 INSIDE THE MIND OF BTK
The combination of his bogus story and his pistol convinced them
to go along with his demands. After tying the two up in separate bedrooms,
Rader racked his brain trying to figure how he was going to
handle this glitch in his plan. Once again, he hadn’t foreseen the possibility
of a man being at the house.
“How do you do away with one without the other knowing it?”
he later wrote.
The next fifteen minutes were pure chaos. He was running back
and forth from bedroom to bedroom, trying to keep control of a situation
that was quickly deteriorating. Absolutely nothing was going
according to his carefully rehearsed plan. In an attempt to kill the boy,
he ended up shooting him two times in the head. His nerves were so
frayed that he accidentally fired an additional round through the bathroom
wall. He tried to strangle the young woman, but it seemed to be
taking too long, so he grabbed his knife and began stabbing her. “I
drove one in her back below the rib cage, hoping to hit the lungs,” he
wrote. Blood splattered everywhere. Rader later commented that he
was amazed at how slick it felt when it got on his fingertips.
Just as he was just preparing to jab the blade into the woman’s
neck, he heard the front door open. He ran to the front window in
time to see the young man he’d shot stumbling down the street, trying
to flag down a car. In a flash, Rader grabbed his gear and ran like
hell out the back door.
This time, Rader didn’t bother to write what happened in the
hours after the murder. In an entry penned weeks later, he did explain
that he once again believed it to be just a matter of time before the
police nabbed him.
He confessed to his journal that he’d been transformed into a nervous
wreck. He couldn’t recall ever reading about such a botched
crime that didn’t end with the guy who did it going to jail. But the
cops never came. Even after weeks and months passed, Rader was still
on edge.
One afternoon in October 1974, a high school buddy named
Bobby Ormston picked up the phone and dialed Rader’s phone number.
I’d first heard about Ormston after a law enforcement source
familiar with the details of Rader’s interrogation passed his name on to
me. Apparently, Rader told the cops that during the final days of his
letter writing campaign in 2004–2005, he’d toyed with the idea of convincing
the authorities that Ormston was BTK. He thought it would